The System z is a significantly more efficient computing environment than distributed servers are. This is evident from many perspectives, shared workload, network, throughput, business cost of downtime, and security. Efficiency is especially evident when looked at from the perspective of the cost of electricity. A comparison of the cost of various applications on a System z shared workload environment vs. running the same application on distributed servers illustrates in a very compelling manner the value of the System z.
WinterGreen Research, a well-known market research company, involved in analysis and forecasting of technology markets for over 30 years has developed ROI models that are designed to work for analysis of IT costs. Many customer engagements have shown that, in many cases, the total System z advantage is $2.48 million less cost for one application. This seems like a very high number until you consider that 70% of IT budgets are for labor and the System z runs with 6 people while a data center runs with hundreds.
The costs of electricity are certain to escalate, creating an even more dramatic difference between the System z and distributed server systems. The System z is a green machine. It uses less power than a large data center. The differences in total initial and operating cost between a System z and a large datacenter are quantum ‐‐ the System z is virtually always less expensive by a factor of 10. This is not what people think.
WinterGreen Research group has sat in meetings with IT directors where System z sales people talk about the “high cost” System z system, commenting that the distributed servers are less expensive. The industry in general has the misperception that the System z is high cost and servers are low cost. This perception is not reality.
Shared workload and high utilization accounts for the difference in cost between distributed servers and the System z. Even server virtualization has very little impact on ROI and comparative costs because the virtualization hardware and software consumes so much of the processing power of the server clusters. The System z is most evidently less expensive because of the lower electricity costs for operating it over five years. The System z box has a green stripe to illustrate that the unit is significantly more efficient than a warehouse full of servers.
“The new IBM zEnterprise System mainframe isn’t really a mainframe anymore –it’s a new kind of ‘uber-server’ that will change the face of computing,” said Bill Miller, Senior Vice President and President, Mainframe Service Management, BMC Software, Inc “IBM zEnterprise represents the key tenets of BMC’s Business Service Management software platform applied to hardware, producing a true cross-enterprise infrastructure suitable for our customer’s most critical business applications. BMC believes that customers will embrace IBM zEnterprise as a tremendous hardware consolidation and simplification play for their data center, and we will be supporting it with new solutions from Day One.”
— Bill Miller, Senior Vice President and President, Mainframe Service Management, BMC Software*
“CA Technologies is planning to support IBM’s new hybrid technology, the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter® Extension (zBX) by continuing to align our mainframe and distributed software stacks to manage, secure and govern our mutual customers’ datacenters” said Mark Combs, distinguished senior vice president for CA Technologies’ Mainframe Business Unit. “This is an ideal system for simplifying management, while also improving the qualities of service, by enabling greater integration between the distributed and mainframe components of a customer’s key workloads. This innovation aligns perfectly with CA’s strategies for systems management, virtualization, service assurance and Cloud computing.”
— Mark Combs, Distinguished Senior Vice President, Mainframe Business Unit, CA Technologies*
“The combination of the new IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter® Extension (zBX) hybrid integrated infrastructure and our multi-tier core-banking application will enable Thaler to provide banks with a modular end-to-end solution on System z that will effectively reduce their TCO, mitigate operational risk and improve IT and Operational services while delivering the scale and performance to meet our clients growing requirements.”
“The end-to-end management process delivered on the new IBM zEnterprise System will provide improved control over an integrated distributed environment. This will yield superior efficiency and improved operational thru-put for our MANTIS application users.”
Hear what Howard Rubin, CEO & Founder of Rubin Worldwide has to say about the economics of computational platforms. Below is his white paper.
“For a few moments, don’t even think about information technology (IT)…. think about the automobile. There are roughly 750 million to 900 million of them on our planet. And even though today we have hybrids, synergy drive, electric cars, and diesel, the internal combustion engine powers 99% of them and is still predicted to be the main engine of transportation with 50% penetration through at least 2025.
The internal combustion engine has been with us more than 100 years. And yes, there are major issues with its use of oil and the impact of its emissions on client change, but consider how it has evolved and been tuned and refined based on a century of experience.
In fact this became more than obvious to me on May 27th as I attended the U.S. introduction of the Ferrari 458 in Greenwich CT. There, under glass, as an integral part of this automotive masterpiece of art and design ,was a 275 cubic inch internal combustion engine producing 580 horsepower or about 2.11 horsepower per cubic inch. It was not quite my “father’s Oldsmobile” (he actually had a 1970 Buick and yes, Oldsmobile is gone) – which had 350 cubic inches and produced 125 horsepower or .24 horsepower per cubic inch at likely less miles per gallon than the Ferrari. Perhaps Moore’s Law works for engines too. In 40 years we have seen almost a 10x improvement in efficiency. And that
improvement is just really hard to discount or discredit and toss all away in the name of replacing all computational engines with the “flavor of the day” – servers, blades, perhaps the “cloud”.
By the way, please don’t assume at this point that this article is about mainframe superiority. Rather it is about the economics of computational platforms and the criticality of transparency into this dimension of technology economics in maximizing the value of IT to your business.”…to read more click here
The z/VM hypervisor offers a base for organizations that want to exploit IBM virtualization technology on one of the industry’s best-of-breed server environments—the System z platform. Test and development servers can run side by side on the same hardware as production, helping to improve resource utilization and offer significant operational advantages. With the z196 design for increased capacity and the number of available processor cores per server, and reduced energy usage and floor space, it is a perfect fit for large-scale consolidation. The z196 virtualization capabilities can support up to 50 distributed servers on a single core, up to thousands on a single system.
The new heterogeneous zEnterprise technology is centered around creating a virtual server environment for deploying applications that have affinity to data hosted on the z196 butrun on UNIX or X86. The virtual servers on Application Server Blades (ASBs) can be created and associated with a pool of resources that are then grouped with System z virtual servers to define a workload for which coherent management and performance policies can be defined and enforced. Thiswill allow better end-to-end application integration with System z transaction processing, messaging and data serving capabilities.
Power and cooling discussions continue to be part of any IT budget planning. As energy prices have risen and utilities have restricted the amount of power usage, it is important to review the role of the server in balancing IT spending. A zEnterprise System can help take better control of energy usage in the data center. Unified Resource Manager will monitor and provide trend reporting of energy efficiency for the entire heterogeneous infrastructure. New static power savings mode allows for turning off engines that are not being used. New query max potential power will help when doing total data center energy use management.
There is value in reducing wattage and power across the entire data center and zEnterprise offers solutions that can help. The z196 will have a water cooled option that doesn’t increase the system footprint and offers energy savings without compromising performance. There is an option for high-voltage dc, which can eliminate the need for a Universal Power Supply (UPS) inverter and Power Distribution Unit(PDU). Top exit I/O cabling can improve flexibility in the data center by helping to increase air flow in a raised-floor environment. And the zBX has an optional rear door heat exchanger to reduce energy consumption.
Along with having multiple technologies to manage, IT departments must be agile so they can respond rapidly to change. It may be necessary to coordinate changes in people, processes and technology. The z196 can help.
The server will continue to build on the System z capacity on-demand offerings that simplify making modifications. Permanent Capacity Upgrade can be initiated by the customer using Resource Link via CIU (Customer Initiated Upgrade). Temporary capacity is available with IBM On/Off Capacity on Demand (On/Off CoD) when satisfying short-term spikes in capacity or for testing new applications when needed. Capacity Back-up (CBU) can help provide reserved emergency capacity for multiple processor configurations.
And Capacity for Planned Events (CPE), a variation on CBU is available when there is unallocated capacity available in a server, CPE will allow up to the maximum capacity available to be used for planned events such as planned maintenance in a data center. A three-day CPE contract can be purchased at a fixed price based on the amount of capacity you need to turn on.
Enhancements to our on-demand capability offer simplification for your staff. The z196 eases management of your On/Off CoD records by eliminating the need to manually replenish the expiration data on your On/Off CoD records. Resource Link will now monitor the On/Off CoD records and generate a replenishment record for each installed record. And back by popular demand is the Administrative Test for On/Off CoD providing an option to do training and API testing without activating any capacity. Another new simplification offering is available for purchasing unassigned capacity. Unassigned capacity is purchased general purpose scores or IFL capacity that for business reasons is not turned on. Prior to the z196, you needed to work with the sales team to purchase unassigned capacity. CIU has been updated to allow you to order additional unassigned engines.
The tightly integrated zEnterprise solution delivers on the strengths inherent in mainframes to provide the premier platform for enterprise business applications. The flexibility and choice that zEnterprise provides can help organizations lower costs, capture insights and act on new opportunities. Consider a few ways in which this platform can be used to extend the value of existing IT investments.
SAP Business Suite and SAP industry solutions
Scenario: A university runs SAP human resource, finance, procurement and general business applications. It wants to extend services to additional branch campuses. The challenge is to expand without adding management headaches or unnecessarily increasing costs—all while ensuring availability across locations. The answer lies in consolidating applications from the Intel® processor-based distributed server environment and integrating them with zEnterprise.
Applications for banking and other financial industries
Scenario: A bank can reduce costs and gain client insight more quickly if it upgrades applications while leveraging its existing investments in core systems and data. zEnterprise can simplify a complex infrastructure and provide flexible new alternatives to deliver value to the bank’s customers. The bank can deploy new capabilities while extending and protecting its IT assets.
Customer relationship management applications
Scenario: A nationwide retail business implements zEnterprise to provide the ideal platform for reaching outward to serve its customers while at the same time reaching inward to leverage existing investments in processes and data. The flexible, integrated format of zEnterprise allows improvements in efficiency and supports global operations with a smaller carbon footprint.
Reference:
Content taken from IBM zEnterprise: The smart platform for business applications brochure – ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/zsb03038usen/ZSB03038USEN.PDF
The newest generation of IBM System z® servers is a smarter system that delivers the data serving power, security, resiliency and scalability required by today’s and tomorrow’s enterprise business applications.
These new servers combine the computational strength of IBM POWER® systems required for high-performance computing and application serving, the breadth of IBM System x® systems required for low-cost application and front-end web application serving, and the System z platform, with its long track record of proven success in critical environments.
The new IBM zEnterprise™ System delivers groundbreaking flexibility to help you simplify operations and improve service quality. System z virtualization and intelligent workload management capabilities provide a strong foundation that enables multiple workloads to run on a single system with high utilization rates. And zEnterprise takes a bold new step. It allows workloads running on multiple heterogeneous platforms to be
consolidated and managed as a single system delivering System z’s proven qualities of service that business-critical applications require.
With zEnterprise, you can take advantage of the workload processing options best suited to your business requirements. You can break down the barriers of siloed computing structures because you have a new catalyst for innovation and growth. You can reduce the chance of operational errors and downtime, with centralized management capabilities that streamline processes and require fewer resources.
Reference:
Content taken from IBM zEnterprise: The smart platform for business applications brochure – ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/zsb03038usen/ZSB03038USEN.PDF
The marketplace is experiencing an acceleration of trends that will place enormous pressure on information technology organizations just as enterprises are becoming more dependent on flawless IT execution in order to achieve business success. Globalization, once a cliché, is now a necessity as existing and emerging globally-integrated companies leverage global markets to access the best capabilities, knowledge and assets from wherever they reside in the world and apply them wherever required in the world. Savvy web-oriented consumers, raised on the rich experience delivered by entertainment and social networking sites, expect the same experience from all their web transactions. Advanced analytics is fast becoming a staple of business processing. Demand for ad hoc, “what if” queries and an intense focus on risk management are driving the need for real-time intensive processing of vast amounts of data.
All of this is unfolding at a time when IT managers are keenly focused on building out virtualized computing infrastructures and cloud service delivery models to drive costs out of their budgets. Not only do they need to reduce operational costs and complexity, but they also need to achieve breakthrough productivity gains in order to fund new business initiatives. The demand for improved service is relentless; not only must the IT staff improve the quality of existing services, but they must also meet customer expectations for real-time, dynamic access to innovative new services, with no room for false starts due to security, reliability, or resiliency issues.
IBM zEnterprise™ represents a new class of enterprise computing that enables information technology managers to more effectively deliver business value when it is needed, with superior qualities of service, and at a lower cost than “one architecture fits all” alternatives. zEnterprise integrates IBM BladeCenter® technologies with world-class System z® compute facilities to provide a level of workload optimization and consolidation that is unmatched in the industry. With zEnterprise, companies can optimize their IT spending to more closely align with the demands of their business, helping drive down costs while at the same time enabling the rapid adoption of new technologies and solutions needed for marketplace success and competitive advantage.
